Perseverance Rover Completes Sample Depot on Mars Written 31 January 2023

CNET News reports that NASA’s Perseverance rover has created “the first sample depot on another world. NASA JPL announced Saturday that the rover has successfully placed 10 tubes on the Martian ground in a specific pattern that would allow a future mission to come fetch them if needed.” The rover’s efforts “have been in service of a big idea: getting pieces of Mars back to Earth for close study by scientists. Researchers hope they might tell the story of whether the red planet was once home to microbial life. The sample depot is an important part of the upcoming Mars Sample Return (MSR) mission to bring Martian rocks to Earth in the 2030s.” NASA called completion of the depot “a major milestone that involved precision planning and navigation to make sure the tubes could be collected by two helicopters from the MSR mission.”
Full Story (CNET News)